The best and worst states on closing the gender pay gap

President Barack Obama is expected to issue two executive orders this week, in an effort to close the pay gap between men and women. The first would prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against workers who talk about how much they are paid. The second would require federal contractors to give the government pay information broken down by race and gender.

But it is unclear exactly how these orders will be meaningful. "I think they are much more symbolic, to get us talking about the wage gap,"Linda Barrington with the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell noted, adding that "if we don’t do that, we can’t reduce the wage gap."

However, there are significant variations in the wage gap between states. To get some more context around how states compare to each other, take a look at the states where the pay gap is lowest (as calculated by the earnings ratio between men and women, in parentheses):

Washington, D.C. (90%)

Maryland (85%)

Nevada (85%)

Vermont (85%)

New York (84%)

California (84%)

Florida (84%)

Hawaii (83%)

Maine (83%)

Arizona (82%)

North Carolina (82%)

And here are the states where the the gap between what men and women earn compared to each other is the highest:

Wyoming (64%)

Louisiana (67%)

West Virginia (70%)

Utah (70%)

Alabama (71%)

Indiana (73%)

Michigan (74%)

North Dakota (74%)

Alaska (74%)

Idaho (75%)

How does the legal system apply to equal pay standards? According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 45 states have equal pay laws on the books. Five states, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin have none.